Brandy O'Dell was 12 years older than her baby brother, William Wentz , and lived close to 3,000 miles away from him for much of his life. But a little more than a year after his death from a heroin overdose, she is finding ways to honor his legacy by helping others.

Wentz grew up in Spring Grove , where he played lacrosse and attended Spring Grove Area High School. He was a quiet, outdoorsy boy, O'Dell said, and had a love for hiking, children, cooking and traveling.

Although O'Dell moved to San Francisco 14 years ago, she maintained her relationship with her brother through frequent phone calls and by sending him postcards of all the places she visited.

Many of these cards included notes addressed to Buns — a nickname she had given him when he was just a baby.

"I called him Buns because he was squeezable," she said.

Wentz 's life started going downhill, though, after he graduated from York County High School in 2008, O'Dell said. He started smoking marijuana, drinking and taking pain pills, and he had several brushes with the law after being charged with driving under the influence.

At the age of 20, he moved to San Francisco to live with his sister in the fall of 2011, hoping a change of scenery would help him overcome his habits. And for a few months, it did.

O'Dell tracked every move he made to ensure he stayed clean.

She sent him to daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with a binder that he had to have the teacher sign to prove he had actually attended. She sent him to a psychiatrist twice a week and had him drug-tested once a week. If she gave him cash to buy a sandwich, she made sure he returned with the receipt and the change.

"I remember one day," she said, "we were sitting on the sofa and I told him, 'William, I hate doing this.'"

With tears in his eyes, she said, he responded: I need you to do this for me. Because if you don't, I'm not going to make it.

Over time, Wentz 's life seemed to be changing for the better. He worked out, cooked breakfast in the mornings and attended social events with his sister when he wasn't at therapy. He also considered career options, like going to culinary school, before deciding he wanted to go into real estate sales.

"You could tell he really felt good about himself," she said.

O'Dell later learned the few months her brother spent with her in California marked the longest he had stayed clean in five years.

In Feb. 2012, Wentz returned to Spring Grove for a court date. He intended to come back to California, O'Dell said, but he started using heroin shortly after his return to York County and ended up in the hospital from a nonfatal overdose a few months later.

O'Dell saw him for the last time in January of 2013 when she took him and their mother out for dinner during a business trip to Baltimore. His eyes were glazed over, she said.

She knew he was on something but felt helpless to do anything, knowing he had fallen back into addiction after she did so much to try to help him.

"I drove him back to the house. He hugged me. He said, 'I love you.' And that was it," she said.

He died outside of a York County church in March of 2013. He was 22.

The idea

O'Dell wanted to honor her brother's legacy, so she started searching for resources that addicts could use to find help. Although she does not know for sure that the right online resources would have helped her brother, she often wonders.

During her search, she found countless websites by parents who had lost children, but nothing quite matched what she wanted.

"I don't know that a teenager would go to one of these sites and say, 'This is going to help me,'" she said.

She launched her website, I Have Will, to fill this void in June. While the site already lists dozens of national resources, she hopes to add more.

First, O'Dell wants to create a database of support groups so people can enter their zip codes and find meetings that match their location and availability. She also wants to create a database that opiate users and their families can use to find the overdose treatment drug, Narcan.

Her ideal site would include a feature like the iPhone app Uber — an online database of individuals offering taxi services — which volunteers could use to offer driving services for people who want to attend meetings but do not have transportation. If they could not find a ride, they could use the site's live meeting feature to attend via livestream.

A Sponsor on Demand feature would also help addicts reach a compassionate voice 24 hours a day, O'Dell said.

As she envisions it, all of these features would be available both on her existing website and on a mobile app .

"The big idea is to have all of these resources available to people in one place," she said.

O'Dell is working with investors and volunteers to raise money to develop these resources. Her fundraising efforts include a poker run through York County on Oct. 4.

Saying goodbye

Going through her brother's belongings after he died, O'Dell was surprised to find he had kept most of the postcards she had sent him over the years.

She wanted to find a way to continue the tradition she had with her brother, but she did not want to continue buying postcards because the sadness that came with knowing they would never be sent was too much to bear.

About seven months after Wentz died, O'Dell took a small portion of his ashes and stored them in a glass corked bottle so he could travel with her everywhere she went. She took photos of the ashes at beaches and other destinations throughout the country, along with props, like sand buckets, showing the location and date.

About a year ago, she separated part of these ashes into another corked bottle, along with a photo of herself and a poem she wrote for her brother. She tossed them under the Golden Gate Bridge into the Pacific Ocean.

"And who knows, maybe one day someone will find it and I'll know where it's been," she said. "Until then, a part of him is traveling like he always wanted to do."

About Brandy O'Dell

Brandy O'Dell is the founder of I Have Will ( www.ihavewill.com), a website that provides information for people struggling with substance abuse and their families. The site also includes O'Dell's stories about her younger brother, William Wentz , who died from a heroin overdose in March 2013 at the age of 22. O'Dell is currently raising funds to expand the site and develop a mobile phone application.